Month: August 2015

With just 5 days to go until we FREE PRIDE we can now very excitedly reveal to you all the full line up for our day time event – taking place in The Art School from 2pm until 8pm!

We will have the Assembly Hall, Project Space 1, and Project Space 2 of The Art School – all rooms are wheelchair accessible, and there will be gender neutral toilets. Each room will have something different going on in the spirit of Pride.

Project Space 1 will be home to a series of talks and workshops on various issues important to the LGBTQIA+ movement

Our night time event at The Art School from 10pm on Saturday will feature – as well as DJs, and short films – performances by local LGBTQIA+ performers:

ULTRA is a fresh face on the Glasgow drag scene. Having previously performed at Polyester at the Flying Duck and at the Art School’s Degree Show Party, their performance will undoubtedly feature glitter, glamour and killer heels.

“Are You In or Out?” is a new devised piece exploring the process of ‘coming out’ by Nicole J Owens. Imagining a generation where coming out didn’t exist and you were able to just be who you are without that obligatory process.

Gloria as an act is about exploring the inbetween – the space between genders, the space between bad taste and political satire, the space between their eyebrows, the space between ugly and glamorous, the space between drag and actual self, the space between talent and delusion.

Sex Worker Open University is a project created by and for sex workers. The project brings together sex workers, academics, activists, artists and allies to explore the richness, diversity and contradictions of the sex industry. SWOU wants to give a voice to sex workers, whose lives are too often stereotyped and voices too often silenced. They want to challenge media sensationalism, which, hand in hand with the UK government, often represents sex workers as victims or criminals.Their aim is to empower the community through workshops, debates, actions and art projects, as well as fighting against sex work criminalisation.

At Free Pride, members of Sex Workers Open University will be giving a talk entitled “Sex workers rights are LGBTQ rights” and discussing why the LGBTQI movements need to support the struggle for decriminalisation of sex work. The workshop will consist of a short presentation on the sex workers’ rights movement by several members of Sex Worker Open university, followed by a Q&A.

To help make the Pride march the sort of event we hope it to be, we are holding a night of arts and crafts to create political banners and posters that will catch the attention of everyone around. This nights will also be a good way for people to meet others and socialise before the event on Saturday!

On June 28 1970 the Christopher Street Liberation Day march in New York City marked the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Brenda Howard – a member of the Gay Liberation Front and other queer activist groups, who was a bisexual, polyamorous, sex-positive feminist, involved in BDSM – became known as the “Mother of Pride” for her work in coordinating the commemorative march. The March started a long tradition of commemorative marches held every year all around the world.

Pride marches are important. They remain a defiant and sometimes vibrant assertion and celebration of identity and community. They remain highly political spaces with the potential for protest and activism to fight for change. And they remain an event in which it takes a lot of courage to attend, especially in places in the world where there is increased threat of attack.

Free Pride will be joining Glasgow Pride’s Pride march on August 22nd before our free event. We will march to peacefully protest the issues in our manifesto and the issues we will be exploring during our event. We would love for you to march with us!

One of the main issues that Free Pride has been set up to protest is the commercialisation of Pride. Pride is for LGBTQIA+ people. It is not for corporations to make themselves look LGBT friendly and make profit off us. Commercial forces are at work in Pride events all around the world, and we need to bring this to an end.

Earlier this year the founder of the website Project Queer made a pie chart showing the groups who were registered to march at this year’s Chicago Pride. His graph shows there were 132 floats or parade slots held by corporations, compared to just 11 held by LGBTQ groups, 5 by groups related to queer people of colour, 1 by a bisexual group, and 1 by a trans group. The representation of trans people at a Pride event should never be equal to or less than the representation of Starbucks.

“Acceptance is very, very in these days. And while many take heart to see rainbows and glitter across their favorite brands, some LGBTQ-rights advocates are increasingly divided over whether that’s unequivocally a good thing—particularly if it’s coming at the expense of the radical politics that characterized the Stonewall Riots that birthed the modern pride movement.”

If a pie chart was made of your local Pride march, would it fare better than Chicago’s?

Homelessness and poverty disproportionately affects young LGBTQIA people, who may be kicked out of their homes, are often discriminated against when trying to secure housing or employment, and face violence and harassment. These issues are rarely mentioned when discussing LGBTQIA rights, and that’s something we want to change.

WestGAP is an anti-poverty community group run by and for people in Glasgow who have first-hand experience of living in poverty. They provide a free, independent and confidential advice service covering welfare rights as well as support with housing problems, fuel poverty, homelessness and a wide range of other issues.

WestGAP will have a stall at Free Pride, and will also be giving a talk on LGBTQIA homelessness and poverty, looking at how new cuts to benefits will disproportionately affect LGBTQIA young people.
We hope to raise awareness of this issue and make it central to discussions of LGBTQIA rights, as well as making people aware of the brilliant support and help WestGAP provide!